During much of my childhood and adult life spent in Pakistan, I watched banners, signs and billboards around Peshawar, Charsadda and other cities advertising a promise of going to foreign countries. Study in the UK, work permit in Italy, and so forth. Usually, those signs would have a student sitting out in the open in the greenest possible grass looking and smiling at a book surrounded by a bunch of blonde girls. I never grasped the idea of how one could study and smile at the same time. Many people wouldn't be able to study with a bunch of blonde girls sitting around. But, those signs never failed in convincing the youth that they could be that guy sitting among the blondes.

That image forms in the mind from the outset: that a better everything is out there on the other side of the planet. Sort of like the Neeli Jheel story by Shafiq-ur-Rehman. In American society, teenagers desperately wait to get to the age of 18 so that they can........

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